256 WARFARE IN THE HUMAN BODY 



and the two original roots which make it up came from 

 the Turkic family of speech. For there is to be found 

 in the Turkic tongues in various forms what looks like the 

 very word itself. In Turkish itself it is spelt vourmak, 

 which means " to beat." In this word vour is the root, 

 which means " beat," and mak or, rather, mag, is the 

 original root, both in the Turkic and Aryan families, 

 which means " make." That mak is common to these 

 two groups seems tolerably certain, though how it came 

 to be in both nobody knows. We certainly cannot con- 

 nect the Turkic with the Aryan group, and yet the root 

 mak is very widely spread. Thus vourmak means literally 

 " to make blows " or "to whip." It is odd that it is 

 seldom employed in any Turkic tongue to mean beating 

 with a stick or whip. In that case the root dyon is more 

 commonly used. When we remember that in the Greek 

 Ritual the Pharmakos was beaten with agnus castus, 

 with squills and other flowers, that must have some signi- 

 ficance. We may note that vourmak, " to beat," may 

 just as often have the termination mek when the Turkish 

 laws of euphony demand it. One of the Turkish sub- 

 stantival gerunds of vourmak is vour our or v/irfir, which 

 seems to be, curiously enough, the exact philological 

 equivalent of the Latin verber, a thong or whip, which is 

 apparently an oddly reduplicated form. From this it 

 seems the real meaning of Pharmakos is just a beaten or 

 whipped person, and at last, by a later process of semantics, 

 one who has been driven out with blows. Whether one 

 is justified in bringing in Latin in this case is a matter 

 of question, but it is certainly interesting to note that 

 the reduplicated root in verber and verberare and in verbero 

 (one who deserves a flogging) has in some ways a look as 

 if it did not belong to the Latin tongue, but was an importa- 



